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THE LONGMAN SPOKEN AMERICAN CORPUS: providing
an in-depth analysis of everyday English
Karen Stern
Providing good coverage of American English in Longman's dictionaries from this side of the
Atlantic might seem a difficult task. How does a Yankee over here keep from falling victim to
the insidious transatlantic drift? The Longman Spoken American Corpus, owned by Pearson
Education and gathered by Professor Jack Du Bois and his team at the University of California
at Santa Barbara (UCSB), is one of the most important tools our American team of
lexicographers has for presenting students with American English as it is used every day. The
spoken corpus, used in concert with two corpora of written American English, gives us full
coverage of the language in all its forms.
The Spoken American Corpus is a five million word database gathered from 12 regions across
the continental US. Equal numbers of participants were chosen from each region, and a
balance was struck between the numbers of participants from rural and city areas within those
regions. UCSB sent project workers out to each of the regions to deliver portable tape
recorders to the participants who then recorded four hour chunks of their normal daily
conversations over periods of at least four days. Records were kept of the situations being
recorded, and of the demographic details of everyone involved in the conversations.
The conversations were recorded as unobtrusively as possible, with the tape recorders simply
being allowed to run for four hours at a time wherever the conversations were taking place. The
tapes were edited to weed out silences and long stretches of garbled material and, finally,
transcribed for Pearson Education team of American keyboarders. None of the last names,
addresses, or telephone numbers that were talked about on the tapes were transcribed. This
combined with the fact that participants were guaranteed anonymity resulted in the natural
conversations we required.
The participants were chosen to be representative for gender, age, ethnicity, and educational
experience. The demographic breakdown follows the latest US census statistics:
GENDER:
AGE:
Male 50% Female 50%
*18 24
25 34 20%
20%
!
!
!
35 44 20% 45 60 20%
60+ 20%
!
ETHNICITY:
White 75%
Black 13% Hispanic 8% Asian 4%
EDUCATION:
Degree/Higher Degree
33%
!
College
33%
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High School
33%
!
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(*children are also represented in a large number of conversations throughout the corpus)
The Spoken American Corpus is used, as all our corpora are, to provide the student with
grammatical, lexical and frequency information as well as with natural examples of typical
usage. As several people in these pages have attested, spoken language yields a number of
linguistic features that have only recently begun to be covered in learners' dictionaries.
Although one or two of the items of lexis, grammar, and discourse that follow have begun to be
used in Britain, they are all uniquely American in origin.
SLANG
For the student who likes to be up on the latest slang, the Spoken American Corpus presents
us with, among other things, buff, fine, and way to go all terms of praise and general approval
used by the younger generations. A typical corpus line for buff, used to describe someone with
a particularly well formed, well toned physique follows (taken from a conversation in which a
young woman describes a former college classmate):
Example:
...you know he was like a total skater like cute little
buff guy freshman year, but he was cute at Davis still
too
Fine is also a term of admiration for an attractive person, although it does not specifically
describe the body, and might better be defined as "very good looking". A case in point is the
simple and deeply felt utterance of one man on the corpus: A bunch of fine ladies out there.
The same women who knew the "little buff guy" mentioned above, also use fine in the following
lines to describe another one of their classmates.
Example:
I remember all the guys saw this picture and they
totally wanted to meet her they were like God that
Ursula girl is fine, then they finally realized that she
wasn't all that.
Evidence from the Corpus also suggests that fine can be used to describe things or places as
well as people, as in a conversation about a vacation in Tucson, Arizona that describes various
activities in that area as "so fine".
Way to go is probably the oldest of the three, having started its life over 20 years ago as a
cheer used in sports events by cheerleaders to urge the team on. Its status has been upgraded
since then to that of a general statement of approval for something that someone has done
well. It is surprising to find that none of the major American dictionaries' latest editions cover
this phrase, especially in light of the fact that it is now frequently used sarcastically a sure sign
that a phrase has found its place in the language. Here, two women are talking as one is
cleaning house:
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Example:
Speaker 1:
Speaker 2:
Speaker 1:
Speaker 2:
Speaker 1:
Speaker 2:
Crash.
What did you break?
l broke my <unclear> holder.
That teal one?
Yep
Way to go.
NEW USES FOR COMMON WORDS
As well as pointing out new words that are only used in spoken English, our aim is to give
students useful information about the way words are used. The Spoken American Corpus has
given us some interesting insights into new senses of very basic words that students may well
assume they have already mastered. So, for example, students hearing Boy, that is one ugly
car might well wonder where the other one is. To clear up any confusion, the forthcoming
Longman Dictionary of American English (LDAE) gives them the following functional definition
and example at one:
spoken said in order to emphasize your
description of someone or something: That is
one cute kid!
To a student who has been taught that we use easy to refer to things that we learn or work at,
the phrase I'm easy, meaning "it doesn't matter to me what we do", might cause consternation.
Many of the learners dictionaries cover the phrase, which has become popular on both sides of
the Atlantic, but, interestingly enough, the 10 million word spoken element of the British
National Corpus (BNC)' does not contain any examples of the phrase. The Longman Spoken
American Corpus, however, has several lines illustrating this use. For example:
Example:
Speaker 1:
Speaker 2:
Mhm, So I wonder what I should do, shall I do
that, leave my stuff here and then come back
here? But you want to go into the mall, right?
I, I mean, I'm easy. I can do whatever you need
to do. I can just take you out there and bring
you back or..
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GRAMMAR
The corpus is providing us with the long awaited evidence we need to further the cause of
spoken English in the classroom. McCarthy and Carter in their article Spoken Grammar: What
is it and how can we teach it? [2]: point out that the spoken language has its own grammar and
that “learners” need to be given choices between written and spoken grammars". This fact has
only just begun to change in Britain in the last few years with the advent of spoken corpora. In
America, the spoken revolution has yet to take root.
Take for example the phrase you guys which has been in use in American English for at least
40 years. While most American dictionaries give a basic definition of this sense of guys, very
few of them explain how it is actually used. The word indicates not just the two or more men to
whom you are speaking, but any two people male or female. It has come to be used (along with
"y'all" in the southern states) as a substitute for the plural form of "you".
Over half the corpus for guys is taken up with the phrase you guys, as in the sentence Hey,
are you guys ready to eat? However, another eighth of the corpus material shows that these
guys and those guys are also used commonly when the speaker is talking to or about two or
more people without reference to gender. A few cases in point:
Example 1:
... It seems like those guys change their
divorce agreement almost [weekly]
Example 2:
But, uh, those guys would kill me if I didn't
show up to play at this party.
Example 3:
...we were gonna play Travial Pursuit and
couldn't decide how to divide up tile team, so I
said alright you three guys against me
While some might argue that this is not standard English, this use of guys occurs 600 times
per million words in the corpus, making it far too frequent to ignore. Certainly, students wishing
to be able to speak real American English will benefit from seeing how it is used. The new
LDAE gives the following definition:
you guys/those guys spoken said when talking to or about two or more people:
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We'll see you guys Sunday, okay?
Are those guys coming with us or not?
DISCOURSE
Attempts to mimic American English often involve beginning sentences with I guess and
inserting like before every third word, and although using these terms does not guarantee a
successful imitation, the corpus confirms that they are indeed amongst the most frequent
utterances in spoken American English (I guess occurs 756 times per million and like occurs a
staggering 9,010 per million). More interesting, however, are some of their more subtle uses in
discourse.
We already know that I guess is typically used to show uncertainty and is often used in
statements in which a conclusion is drawn, as in the sentence He said he wasn't hungry, so I
guess he ate at Ron's. What the corpus shows is a use of the phrase that is neither of these.
Looking at the following lines we see it being used to report events that the speaker knows
about secondhand.
Example 1:
Speaker 1:
Speaker 2:
Example 2:
Speaker 1:
Speaker 2:
Who yelled at you?
Well, Greg didn't yell, but I guess Mr. [name]
really had a fit about it.
She was a nanny.
A nanny. Yeah. But then I guess she came back
home...
The information reported after I guess is not known firsthand by the speaker in either of these
cases. However, it is not uncertain, and unlike the statement ...so I guess he ate at Ron's, none
of these lines show that the speaker is trying to draw a conclusion from pieces of information
he or she has been given. These are statements that are known to be true, but that the speaker
introduces with I guess to show the listener that the knowledge is secondhand. This use is
more frequent than one might expect, occuring approximately 70 times per million words.
Like is not always the meaningless filler of space that it might seem to be at first glance
(although sometimes it is very difficult to ascribe a function to it). In the phrases below it is used
with the auxiliary verb "be" (e.g. I'm like, he's like, etc.) to introduce reported speech.
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Example 1:
He says, do you run? I said, yeah. He's like,
how fast? So I'm like. oh.
Example 2:
...another song comes and she's like, you
wanna go dance? and I'm just like...alright
In the lines above like is used as a type of substitute for the verb say, and is also very close in
meaning to go which is used in both American and British English to report speech (as in: Mum
goes, don't you swear at her).
Like has many other functions in spoken American English. In the following lines it shows
shyness or a hesitancy in broaching delicate subjects:
Example 1:
Like could you afford to just give her like
twenty five dollars a week or something
instead of making her ask for it?
Example 2:
Like did you feel kind of emotional when he
starts talking about that?
It is used to mean "for example" when someone begins to explain something or tell a story:
Example 1:
... like there's a technique you can use like if I
were using erm, er the I, the first person
singular...
Example 2:
...the only thing with the sushi in this town is so
overpriced you know? Like I went to this stupid
little clone or <unclear> it's like twenty bucks
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The list of functions goes on, and given that, according to the corpus, Americans say like once
in every 110 words, it is a word that warrants much more attention.
The Spoken American Corpus is the latest addition to the growing body of corpora, and it is the
first database that documents American spoken English on a substantial scale. Its first
applications can already be seen in the third edition of the Longman Dictionary of
Contemporary English. It has also been used extensively in compiling the forthcoming LDAE.
Given that there is always more slang to discover and that the possibilities in the areas of
spoken grammar and discourse are seemingly endless, we are very glad at Pearson Education
to have this tool to help us investigate the language further.
NOTES
The British National Corpus is a collaborative corpus collected
1 by Longman, Oxford University Press, and Chambers, with the
universities of Oxford and Lancaster. The BNC was partly
funded by the British Government and is easily available for
research within the European Union. Longman's particular
contribution was the creation of the Spoken Corpus of the
BNC.
2 McCarthy M, Carter R 1994 Spoken Grammar: what is it and
how can we teach it? ELT Journal. July 1995: 207
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